


protecting an investment: mindfang, dualscar, dolorosa

by coldhope



Series: HHCOD fills [24]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gore, Head Injury, Major Character Injury, Mind Control, ahcod request fic, shipboard surgery, subdural hematoma, trepanning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-13
Updated: 2013-06-13
Packaged: 2017-12-14 21:39:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/841672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/pseuds/coldhope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's lounging in the chair at the head of the table, red boots propped on the edge, grinning that predator's grin. Stripped to her shirtsleeves, black mane tumbling over her shoulders, she laces her fingers behind her head and regards Dualscar's man for just long enough to be really worrying before saying "Well? Why are you taking up space on my ship and dripping on my deck?"</p>
<p>He doesn't have a hat, but if he did, he'd be twiddling it anxiously in his hands right now. You go on sewing tiny neat stitches into the rip in her coat's lining, but you are listening hard. </p>
<p>"It's my Cap'n, yer 'onor," he tells the deck. </p>
<p>"What is?" Mindfang is enjoying herself so obviously that you start to feel echoes of it rippling along the link she's forged for herself into your head. </p>
<p>"He's...hurt bad, marm. Terrible bad."</p>
            </blockquote>





	protecting an investment: mindfang, dualscar, dolorosa

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first time I've written any of the Serkets, so I crave your indulgence if it doesn't ring true. In addition, this has some explicit descriptions of Napoleonic-era surgical procedures, so if you're not into major head trauma and similar, you might want to turn back.

selenaestella asked:  
Head injury, Ampora of your choice

(This is ambitious, but I've been wanting to try it for a long time now.)

~

You are repairing one of her coats when the messenger arrives, and by now you know her well enough to be sure she hasn't forgotten your presence in the stateroom: she means you to overhear whatever is about to be said.

You realize why immediately when the sopping wet greenblood is ushered in, because he's wearing extremely familiar zigzags of livid brand scars down his right cheek. They look odd in green. You hadn't been branded with his household mark because...well, you still aren't entirely sure why you hadn't been branded, and at the time you had been far too lost in cold sick misery to care much; but you still aren't branded, which is something you've been thinking about in between deliberately not-thinking so that you can do for her what she commands. 

She's lounging in the chair at the head of the table, red boots propped on the edge, grinning that predator's grin. Stripped to her shirtsleeves, black mane tumbling over her shoulders, she laces her fingers behind her head and regards Dualscar's man for just long enough to be really worrying before saying "Well? Why are you taking up space on my ship and dripping on my deck?"

He doesn't have a hat, but if he did, he'd be twiddling it anxiously in his hands right now. You go on sewing tiny neat stitches into the rip in her coat's lining, but you are listening hard. 

"It's my Cap'n, yer 'onor," he tells the deck. 

"What is?" Mindfang is enjoying herself so obviously that you start to feel echoes of it rippling along the link she's forged for herself into your head. 

"He's...hurt bad, marm. Terrible bad. There was a storm..."

The legs of her chair thump down to the floor as she swings her boots off the table, with that alarming insectile _quickness_. "What happened?"

"Lightnin' struck the foremast." 

Again, the link in your head--you've come to visualize it as a fishhook seated deep in the meat of your pan--tugs, but this time it isn't glee. "You lose the mast?"

"Yes, marm, but that ain't no trouble, we lost masts afore, but when it was comin' down a spar twisted, sudden-like, an' a block came loose..." He reaches up and his hand touches the back of his head, on the right side, just behind his ear. "He's still breathin, marm, but..."

"Fuck," says your owner--snarls, rather, and snaps her fingers at you, standing up. "Get your finest sewing gear and give me my coat."

~

You are sick in the jolly-boat on the way over, but you are used to that, and to the rain which soaks you to the skin. Mostly what you're interested in--as far as you can be interested in anything at the moment--is what's going on in Mindfang's head. You've seen her as happy as someone like her can get, when she's got the weather gage on some poor hapless idiot with a ship full of treasure; you've seen her incandescent with fury, sullen and irritable, smugly satisfied, but you've never really seen her with this pinched focused look on her face before. It feels odd and ominous being near her, like standing by something very tall in the middle of a thunderstorm. 

Dualscar's ship looks like a disaster area with the foremast gone and half the rigging torn to dollrags. His man admitted they'd pushed her hard in hopes of intercepting your course, and the crew looks exhausted as they haul you aboard on a bosun's chair--your owner having swarmed up the rope ladder in a twinkle of scarlet boots. There's...you swallow...there's purple bloodstains on the deck. 

Large ones. 

You wonder how much blood a violet troll has in him, and how much of it he can stand to have removed. 

It's familiar belowdecks. Very familiar. They've laid him out, not in the sickbay in the forepeak, but on the big chart-table in his stateroom. You think when you see him first that you've been brought over here for nothing, that he's in need of a shroud with a weight at his feet and not the hair-fine needles in your sewing case, but then slowly you see the broad chest rise slightly and fall again. His hands lie open on the table, scarred and hard with rope-calluses; strangely pathetic, like small curled animals. You try not to look at his face.

Mindfang is snapping out orders. Boiled water, razor, whatever their useless excuse for a ship's surgeon might have by way of instruments--oh, they don't _have_ a fucking ship's surgeon, she's not surprised, he's a goddamn idiot and she doesn't know why the hell he's managed to survive this long, lights, no, bring the fucking lights _closer_ , she needs to _see what she's doing_. You are in the corner, in the place where you feel least unsafe, but she snaps her fingers for you and the fishhook in your pan gives a single tug. 

"What can I do?" you ask, instinctively, and she doesn't casually backhand you for speaking without permission. 

"Hold his head steady." Her fingers are already moving carefully over his skull, through the blood-matted hair. They reach the terrible wound behind his ear, and pause, and she takes a breath through her teeth. "Open his eyes for me."

You are not expecting the awful unbalanced stare this reveals: one pupil is blown huge, a black hole eating up all but the thinnest ring of purple, the other fixed narrow and staring past you into somewhere you aren't sure you want to go. It's like looking into a broken automaton's eyes. With a little choking noise you let go of his eyelids and they slowly close over that terrible lopsided glare, but Mindfang has seen what she needs to. "Where's that fucking water? He's got a crater in his skull and his brain's bleeding, did I give you useless lumps an order or not?"

She plays with brains like a mewbeast with yarn. It's her thing, her idiom, even her title advertises it to the world; presumably she also knows how to repair them. 

~

For the first time you're actually grateful for her hook in your head. She's doing something to you that makes it easier to not think about the job at hand, that blocks out the nausea and fear and aversion, and you're not even sure she knows she's doing it. You're holding Dualscar's head between your hands, and your owner has just dropped...a piece of bone...in a bowl on the table beside you, and you can see a dark swollen stain over something glistening and rugose that you are not going to think about because you are looking _at his brain_ at his _brain_ Orphaner Dualscar's actual _brain_ and she does something in your mind and everything recedes, goes cold and clear, as if you're looking down a long tunnel of white ice. "Knife," she says. 

Your hand is perfectly steady as you set the scalpel between her fingers, and you watch dispassionately as the blade slits the membrane over that dark blotch, and as half-clotted violet blood wells out under pressure. Mindfang sets the scalpel in the bowl with what you are aware is a piece of skull, and pours water over the wound; the blood keeps coming, and you think there is perhaps not much blood left in him at this point, but it does stop, and you don't faint, and then she is placing the little curve of bone back over the gap.

He is still breathing. You are dimly surprised by this. She's busy with the water again, and time goes by without you really noticing until she tugs at your mind again and you realize she's holding you by the shoulders. 

"You did good," she's saying. "Now stitch him up, that's your skill, not mine." 

"Is he going to live?"

"No way of knowing." Mindfang glances down at the closed, pale, scarred face. "I've done all I can do, if that's not good enough then it's not my problem. Sew up his head and let's get off this stinking tub, I want a drink."

You want a drink, too: badly you want one. Whatever she's been doing to your mind comes back enough for you to be able to set in a neat line of eighteen stitches across the ragged wound in his scalp, but you're aware enough of what you're doing that you can tell his breathing is different from when you arrived. It had been slower, then, and sort of blurry, snoring. Now it's just slow and faint, as if he's in a very deep sleep. 

She keeps it up all the way back to her ship, and as soon as she withdraws her influence the world goes sparkly grey and you can feel your knees buckling, and then nothing at all. 

~

When you wake up you're in your cupe and the light tells you it's after midnight. The ship is moving all around you, in the way that used to make you frightened and sick and now just makes you sick perhaps half the time, and Mindfang is sitting at the table reading a book. She doesn't look up. "Feeling better?"

"Yes," and it isn't quite a lie. "Did we...really....?"

"Yes." 

"Is he dead?"

"Apparently not. It's going to take him a while to learn how to speak in sentences again, no great loss there, but so far it looks as if he's actually, literally, too thickheaded to kill." She dog-ears her page in the book--she knows it makes you twitch--and puts it aside, coming over to ruffle your sopor-sticky hair. "You've been out for a little while, doll. Go get cleaned up and come up on deck for some air."

It's an order, but the way she says it makes it feel like a suggestion. You put that aside. "You saved his life."

"It's a pain in the ass trying to find a replacement kismesis," she says, and rolls her eyes. "The one I've got is far from satisfactory, but I can't be having with all the business of finding and snagging another, I've got far too many irons in the fire."

"Protecting an investment," you say. A slow grin creeps over her face. 

"Exactly. Protecting an investment. Which is also why I've got more plunder to my name than Orphaner Idiot Dualscar will ever be able to boast, even if he does end up regaining the ability to whine polysyllabically about it in the future. Come on, out, you can't lie around in there all night, this isn't a pleasure cruise."

"Yes," you say, because all of this is true.


End file.
